Rain, Rain, Come and Stay

Neither rain nor sleet nor snow…  okay, well, we don’t really have those last two around here.  But we certainly aren’t letting a little rain stop us from having garden class this week.  Especially since we’ve had so little rain this year, so all of our “rainy day” curricula are languishing in the filing cabinet.  Hurrah for the rain!

 

Number one on our rain list: watersheds.  I grew up near a creek, the flow of water toward which was so easy to see in the acres of open farmland.  I didn’t know the word watershed and didn’t really need to, having an intuitive understanding of the process of water flowing toward the sea.

But these kids mostly live where there are lots of houses, and it’s not always clear where the water in the drainage ditch beside the driveway is heading.  To the neighbors, right? 

So watersheds is our main rainy day theme, and it starts with the big picture.  Big trays of clay that the kids mold into pathways by which precipitation flows toward the wetland (a sponge) and then the ocean.  Hands-on learning, indeed. 

(No cooking today—our kitchen is wet wet wet.)